Pioneers of Anti-Parlimentarismby Guy A. Aldred

placed in an asylum by the Italian Government owing to his grave mental condition. He was discharged many years later but his health had been wrecked and he soon died.

The circumstances that caused Cafiero to endeavor to work out some kind of political expression of Anarchism in common with revolutionary Socialism also changed the nature of Malatesta's propaganda. he gave up the insurrectionary tactics of arms and came forward as the avowed propagandist. He endeavored to create an anti-parliamentary atmosphere and to develop a proletarian faith in revolutionary Anarchism with arguments and appeals to reason. He went to war with logic and common-sense against the fallacies and allurement of parliamentary. Whether my Anarchists comrades recognize it or not, this was a definite development of what Daniel De Leon terms activity on the civilized plane. Quite definitely in my opinion, such propaganda activity not only comes within the category of political action but it is the most fundamental and more useful form of political action. It changes the outlook of the common people and prepares a social psychology and also an individual psychology which finally breaks down all tyranny and undermines all transient appeals to violence. AT the end of the social struggle it is the mind of the people and no mere power of arms that will prevail. Mind has a physical basis but it declines to acknowledge a physical conquest. Mind came after matter in order that mind might conquer matter. This fact is forgotten by all dictators and by most persons who believe in the appeal to violence. I do not disbelieve in the effectiveness of insurrection at certain periods of crisis. I am not opposed to the test of violence on certain critical occasions. But I do protest that when violence decides to act contrary to dictates of reason and to the harmony of the human mind it degenerates the violence in the worst sense of the term and having become disorder is naturally and inevitably overthrown. Nature no more stands for the degradation and the enslavement of the mind of man than it stands for a vacuum.

Malatesta selected Florence for the publication of the paper that expressed this new attitude. He called his paper La Questione Sociale, and it flourished from 1884 to 1885. All previous Anarchist papers had been fighting papers. They were newsy and violent and their news was not always of the greatest importance. But this was a propagandist paper, the first real propagandist paper of the Anarchist and Anti-Parliamentary movement. It initiated a campaign against parliamentary socialism and maintained this campaign consistently and continuously. It created a revolutionary socialist mind and gave a clear Socialist understanding. It pioneered a movement and one that could not be destroyed. To its columns Malatesta contributed the most popular of his pamphlets, like his "Talk between the Two Workers." Needless to say this continuous propaganda of Anarchism was cut short by prosecution. Malatesta had to choose between